sure, the police shouldn't do that, but you guys were sitting ducks out there. What did you expect?

Also up here with responses:

 http://www.democraticunderground.com/duforum/DCForumID61/2030.html#20

many people took photos and we shared addresses.
Please release them here or at  http://www.democraticunderground.com or send me as an attachment.

The Peaceful Tomorrows Washington Square Park Peace Rally and Vigil was promoted as having two parts. First, there would be a stage presention of a speakers and music from 6:00 pm to 10:00 pm. Then, an all-night candlelight vigil from 10:00 pm to 7:00 am. At 7:00 AM, a Closing Ceremony. There was nothing in the promotions to indicate that any of this would take place anywhere but inside Washington Square Park.

The rally began promptly at 6:00 pm. The whole eastern side of the park rapidly filled up, with with perhaps a thousand people in front of the stage and more on the benches and grass.

At 10:00 pm, Carmen Trotta of War Resisters League announced that the sound permit for the event expired at 10:00 and the sound was going to be turned off - but the police were going to allow the sound system to be turned on again for Martin Luther King III, who was late. The sound was then turned off and a classical string quartet played Dvorjak to those in the first rows who could hear them. About 10:30 MLK III arrived, and the sound was turned back on. After his well-received speech, as a Phillipine dancing troupe took the stage, the sound was turned off again.

By this time it had been announced several times that there would be an all-night vigil, that the organizers were going to stay with the group all night, that there wouild be musicians in the fountain area and various faith group celebrations around the park. Nothing was said about the park closing at midnight.

But the park does close at midnight. This was instituted before Giuliani and it's posted on the signs all around the park. But, as it turned out, the organizers had no permit for an all-night vigil in the park.

As midnight approached, with the crowd thinned down to a few hundred, the police asked people to leave so they could close the park as usual. The organizers appeared to be ready for this event. They led people out the east side of the park, across MacDougal Street, to Washington Place, where a group of Buddhist dancers continued their performance in the middle of the street..

Meanwhile, back in the park, a group of perhaps a hundred had remained near the stage area around those who were actively seeking a confrontation with the police. There was a lot of loud shouting and slogan-chanting, including the cry, "Punch the cops!" Individual officers circulated through the park, politely explaining to those who had remained in other areas that the park was closing, that the organizers of the Peace Vigil had already moved to their second permit area on Washington Place, and that over a hundred police were on the way to surround the park and that those in the loud chanting group were refused to leave and could well be arrested when the park was cleared. Officers were also posted at the park entrances, doing the same thing.

Back on Washington Place, people were standing or sitting on both sides of the sidewalk, and the Buddhists were still dancing. Four or five large blank banners had been laid down on the street, and people were signing them and drawing messages on them. A smaller group congregated near the entrance on MadDougal, sitting on the low fence rails or listening to a long, impassioned argument between an old leftist and two young Bush supporters.

As 1:00 approached, police reinforcemnts had indeed arrived. But they made no brute force sweep of the park or any attempt at confrontation. Most of them congregated in small groups at the entrances, complaining that they should have been off-duty or on other important 9/11/02 security assignments long ago, Those who went into in the park continued the approach of reasoning wth individuals. Most of those inside the park responded by leaving. By 1:30 PM, only about thirty hard-core chanters remained in the park, and they marched out together, chanting loudly.

I asked Carmen Trotta why the promotions had described the vigil as being from 10:00 PM to 7:00 PM, and why he hadn't alerted the crowd, from the stage, while the sound was on, to the real situation, including the facts about the midnight closing of the park, the midnight expiration of the vigil permit, and the second permit for Washington Place. Carmen told me that the organizers had no advance idea of how many people would show up for the event, and were hoping that if a large number showed up, the police might relent and let them stay in the park all night.

Several people in the group outside the park seemed to believe that a small group had come to the vigil with a pre-determined agenda, bent on disrupting the peaceful, nonviolent candlelight vigil by provoking a police confrontation on whatever pretext they could find. If that was the case, the organizers certainly handed the confrontationists their opportunity on a silver platter. The misleading promotions, and the failure to clarify the real situation from the stage, left many people with the initial impression that the police were being aribitrary and repressive, trying to break up a legally permitted all-night vigil, when in fact no such thing ever existed. Those in the grip of the confrontation mindset used this misinformation to attempt to change the focus of the vigil from "Our Grief Is Not A Cry For War" to "Punch The Cops."

By the time the park was cleared, the police had asked to open Washington Place as well, and people moved to the sidewalks. It turned out that there was no sound permit for the 7:00 AM Closing Ceremony either, and the group outside the park had thinned even more. I left.

Washington Square Park, 12:15 AM: As the person who began the first chant that led to the peaceful resistance of police orders to disperse, I can assure you that the actions that people took that evening were entirely spontaneous.

I arrived that evening with only one friend, a teen-aged activist whose primary act in the park was to create what I dubbed a “queer tree of knowledge” with gems of wisdom written on papers and taped to a tree that included: “Drag Queens, not M-16s!”; “Bull Dykes, not Missile Strikes!”; “Our Grief Is not a Cry for War”; and “U.S. Out of Iraq, NYU Out of NYC!” He left after an hour or two, but the amazing vigil turned out to be a crossroads of community and I was never without an acquaintance or friend in tow. None of our conversations focused on any type of direct action for the evening.

There are several competing timelines and perspectives on the “uprising,” and I am not going to give another chronological account except to say that I was filled with an anger and sadness that communities are not allowed to dictate how best to meet their needs in New York City. That feeling of powerlessness caused me to utter the first furtive cry of “Whose park?” when the police told everyone to exit the park. A handful of people responded the first time: “OUR PARK!” But within minutes that handful become hundreds and I knew we were on to something.

Police surrounded me along with event organizers. Some event organizers kept telling me I was violent, and the police told me to leave and that I would be arrested. So I casually ditched the marijuana in my bag (not something you tend to carry if you’re expecting arrest, especially at today’s prices). But I continued to chant. I didn’t feel like going to jail that night, but I also didn’t feel like we, the people in that park, should be evicted against our collective will.

Indy Media is amazing because during and after the WTO protests in Seattle, the various collectives have pried open the channels of media power to create a dialogue that most elites are loathe to see. I am also dedicated to creating a dialogue where once there was an advertisement, an order from an authority figure or a politician’s thinly veiled platitudes. The difference is that Indy Media primarily uses the medium of the cyber world, and I am primarily drawn to creating that dialogue on the streets with a black marker, a highly technical aerial direct action, a subway conversation or a street party.

That night in Washington Square Park, I wanted to create a dialogue, not start a riot. Generally, after starting a chant and jumping up on a concrete slab to talk about our need to assert our collective rights in what should be our park, the next steps to a proper riot do not include asking folks to sit in a circle and speak one at time using a candle as the talking stick and making way for people who didn’t yet get a chance to speak. People from 16 to 60, homeless to privileged, snuggled together. They weren’t the ideal arsenal for an attack on the police but a pretty good start for direct democracy. I would say that most of the folks who stayed were not activists in the classical sense of the word, which to me made the event even more meaningful.

People of NYC can’t even gather in a park in numbers larger than 20 without a permit. Does anyone doubt that this is an anti-war issue, a free speech issue, an issue of democracy?

My heart goes out to the police officers who may have been grieving, who may have wanted to be anywhere else as the midnight hour marked the turning of the day to 9/11/02. But I will not, nor should anyone else who chose to remain in the park, be held responsible for a repressive government that has dismantled our civil liberties more in the last year than any other time in the 200+ years since the drafting of our now-tattered Constitution and Bill of Rights. We will not bear the responsibility of the evening's police repression that is part and parcel of this nation's steps towards facism. Further, just as each non-violent resister made her or his choice, each police officer also made her or his choice as to the role that she or he would perform at Washington Square Park.

We live in perilous and powerful times, and it benefits democracy for each of us to follow what is in our hearts and not what is on the lips of authority figures, whether it be commands, platitudes or promises (and whether those figures are police, politicians or event organizers). Too often, the words that these lips form are nothing more than a way to coral us into submission.

Later, an angry woman, who I assume was an organizer for the vigil, confronted me: “Are you happy? The police opened up the street that they had closed for us. A lot of people have left. You ruined it. It’s supposed to be an anti-war protest.” I told her people are not just murdered by the bullets of a rifle. They are murdered by a lack of adequate health care, by starvation, hunger and malnutrition. These maladies, along with all those bombs bursting in air, are the symptoms of a war fought on all lands, including the U.S., the symptoms of a system of control that places profit over people and before any vision of long-term security and sustainability. Our lack of access to the global commons, to the water and fruits of the land, has been subverted to benefit the interests of a privileged few. And this is an act of war.

After an hour and a half past curfew, everyone remaining in the park walked out hand in hand, chanting, “Stop the War Now!” While we left, we did so only after some important ideas and beliefs were exchanged as a community of people; this, to me, is far more powerful than the barrage of leftist speakers who were the only ones given the opportunity to publicly vocalize their opinions earlier in the evening. Over a hundred riot cops with head-to-toe armor and drawn clubs swarmed around us like an angry nest of wasps determined to say the last word in a centuries old argument.

This country supposedly built on freedom takes away your rights whenever it's not convient for the businessmen and the ruling party...Well I'm no business man nor am I part of the "Ruling Party" I'm a Socialist yes thats right an outcast non-american as many would put it. This matters not what does matter though is that the virtues of this country have become oppression, suppression, intimidation, apathy. This country is more blind than it has ever been. We are all cultural prostitutes..."To take away escential liberty for temporary safety deserves, neither liberty nor safety"-Ben Franklin...